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The Chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has called on the government and regulators to take immediate and decisive action in response to the committee’s findings on the “failing water sector,” according to a recent statement from the Parliamentary committee’s news service UK Parliament.

The Committee’s action follows its inquiry into water sector regulation, which scrutinised the performance of water companies and their regulators, including the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra), Ofwat, and the Environment Agency (EA).

Monumental work needed to restore trust

The core of the PAC’s critique focuses on the culture of failure and lack of accountability regarding pollution, leakage, and customer service. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee previously warned that the sector has increasingly operated as a network of financial services businesses rather than custodians of a public good, as highlighted in an earlier Parliamentary report on water sector reform.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, the PAC Chair, stated in the summer of 2025 that “The monumental scale of work required to reverse the fortunes of failing water companies is rivalled only in difficulty by the efforts needed to repair customers’ faith in the sector”.

Call for regulatory overhaul

The latest push for action, detailed in a letter to the Permanent Secretary of Defra, follows the government’s formal response to the PAC’s initial report. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, stated that the letter details “multiple disappointing areas in government’s response, and requests further information on each”.

The need for a radical regulatory overhaul has been widely acknowledged following a landmark review into the water industry led by Sir Jon Cunliffe, which found “deep-rooted, systemic and interlocking failures” across the sector, the government, and the regulators.

In response to the growing public and parliamentary anger, the government has since confirmed plans to abolish the regulator Ofwat and consolidate the functions of four different water watchdogs into a single, more powerful “super-regulator,” as reported by Sky News.

Infrastructure challenges

Key infrastructure problems outlined in various parliamentary reports include:

• A looming national water shortfall of 5 billion litres a day by 2050 based on current usage rates, requiring the construction of multiple new reservoirs.
• The current rate of replacing ageing water mains suggests it could take 700 years to replace the entire network.
• The need for companies to spend around £12 billion in the next five years to update sewage systems, which will only fix approximately 44% of overflows, according to an earlier report that warned the water system was being ‘left to flounder’.